27 pages • 54 minutes read
Frances Ellen Watkins HarperLearning to Read
Fiction | Poem | YA | Published in 1872A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Resistance to Oppression Through Subversion and Symbolic Co-opting of Power Structures
Throughout the poem, Watkins Harper subtly demonstrates how enslaved people resisted their tormentors through subverting and entering into pre-existing power structures.
Watkins Harper portrays enslaved people accomplishing this by playing white enslavers’ expectations against them. If a reader imagines that Uncle Caldwell worked in the fields or kitchens, he probably came home sweaty or greasy. So it would be easy to see how he used grease to mask his book since “his master” might expect him to be dirty from his work. Similarly, readers do not know Ben’s position or age. They can postulate that he used enslavers’ expectations of obedience as an opportunity and a cover to listen in on the white children’s spelling lessons. Without enslavers and their allies realizing it, Watkins Harper shows that Black people found a way to access the tools of power kept for exclusive white use.
Additionally, their newfound literacy skills theoretically enabled freed Black people to engage in the same civic and economic spaces as their white counterparts. Chloe’s implicit link between her homeownership and literacy status illustrates this concept.
The poem ends with Chloe declaring that she feels “independent / as the Queen upon her throne” (Lines 43-44). Through this analogy, she gives herself the same importance and agency as a queen. It reiterates her value and status as a human being.
Centering Black Women
Watkins Harper arguably created a revolutionary figure in Chloe Fleet at the time. The women’s rights and racial justice movements often pushed Black women to focus on white women and Black men, respectively.
Black women endured stereotypes such as the mammy (a woman happy in her enslavement and nursing her enslavers’ children). Single Black enslaved women became figures “of sexual excess and commodification, criminality, and family dysfunction” under the white gaze (Williams, Andreá N. “Frances Watkins [Harper], Harriet Tubman and the Rhetoric of Single Blessedness.” Meridians, vol. 12, no. 2, 2014, pp. 99-122. JSTOR). These stereotypes adversely affected and still affect Black women across the different facets of their lives. These stereotypes do not show Black women as individuals with agency and interiority. Instead, their lives revolve around others, either serving or causing problems for them.
Chloe, on the other hand, narrates her experience. The reader gains insight into her feelings, vulnerabilities, lived experiences, and perceptions. Her ability to read comes across to be as valuable and revolutionary as her earlier male counterparts’ efforts since Watkins Harper places all three of them within a sequence of progress. Finally, she does not live for other people. When Chloe buys a house “to call my own,” the action symbolizes that she recognizes herself as an individual with needs and ambitions that she does not need to sacrifice (Line 42).
Helping Others
In an 1866 address to the audience attending the Eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention, Watkins Harper stated that Americans “are all bound up together.” She explained that exploitation and oppression hurt both the oppressed and the oppressor in the long run: “Society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul” (“We Are All Bound up Together-May 1866”).
“Learning to Read” expresses why exactly that altruism matters on an individual level. As mentioned in “Contextual Analysis: The Reconstruction Era,” Black and white northerners traveled south to help start schools for southern Black communities and act as instructors after the Civil War. Chloe, the speaker of “Learning to Read,” states their presence opened avenues previously blocked. Prior to the war, white enslavers “tried to hide / Book learning” from both enslaved and free Black people since it would “make us all too wise” (Lines 5-8). As a result, southern Black people like Uncle Caldwell and Ben had to find methods to obscure their learning and reading material from oppressors.
However, the arrival of “the Yankee teachers” enabled southern Black people the chance to pursue education openly and on their terms. Chloe praises the teachers by saying, “they helped us” (Line 27). The teachers’ successes inspire Chloe to master reading. Her new skills aid her quest to buy a permanent home. The northerners’ compassionate and giving actions helped Chloe recover from the trauma and build a better life.
Chloe also provides altruistic acts. By telling Uncle Caldwell and Ben’s stories, Chloe gives readers examples of hope and success against violent oppression. While the effects may not directly result in material gain and high social status, her stories could provide blueprints for future subversive actions and solace during difficult times. Her narrative is aspirational too. Readers might gain the courage to pursue their goals when they see that Chloe learns to read at 60 years old despite naysayers.
